A streetcar picks up passengers in downtown Portland, Ore., in this file photo. DON RYAN, AP

Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that the Greater Santa Ana Business Alliance put on this year's State of the City event, which featured Mayor Miguel Pulido.

SANTA ANA - A company with deep political connections stands to win control of a $6 million streetcar project going before the City Council today, even though the city's own experts ranked it dead last.

Cordoba Corp. would spend more than two years designing and planning a streetcar line through downtown - and figuring out how to pay for it - under the proposed contract. The team it assembled has worked on similar streetcar projects around the nation, according to a staff report.

Santa Ana's proposed streetcar would trundle from the train depot through the Civic Center and eventually reach the 22 freeway. It would allow Metrolink commuters to leave their cars at home and reach downtown businesses and office buildings entirely by rail. City officials hope to have an initial line running in five years.

Cordoba was one of three companies that submitted proposals to do the work. An evaluation panel reviewed those proposals and gave Cordoba the lowest average score, by a wide margin.

A committee of City Council members then interviewed the three companies and recommended that Cordoba lead the project. City officials have refused to release some documents - including price estimates and internal memos - that might shed more light on how they chose Cordoba.

The company has a long history in Santa Ana. It hosted a special Los Angeles fundraiser for Mayor Miguel Pulido when he was still a rookie councilman, campaign-finance records show. The company and its associates were significant donors to some of Pulido's early campaigns, records show.

More recently, people with ties to Cordoba - including company president George Pla - contributed several thousand dollars to Councilman Carlos Bustamante's failed campaign for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. The company also helped sponsor the Greater Santa Ana Business Alliance's State of the City event this year, which featured Pulido.

Pla also was one of the local business and political leaders who founded the Santa Ana Business Bank. Bustamante, who serves with Pla on the bank's board of directors, has removed himself from past discussions of the streetcar contract. "I don't want even any appearance of impropriety," he said.

Pla has said he won the contract because he knows the city and knows its needs. "It's not about political connections," he said in a recent interview. "It's about trust. … Getting this project to be a success is about having trust in the team."

The proposed contract would pay Cordoba and its consultants more than $4.8 million to put plans, designs and analysis behind the city's streetcar ideas. The city plans to spend another $1.2 million on project management, an outside review team and other associated costs.

The Orange County Transportation Authority will shoulder almost the entire cost of that planning process, using money it collects from a half-cent sales tax.

As part of its contract, Cordoba will also look into how to pay to operate such a streetcar system. Possible sources of money, according to city documents, include special business assessments, developer fees and municipal parking districts.

Cordoba emerged as the council's pick to get the contract despite its low ranking from a panel of experts that included city administrators, a planner and an engineer. The panel gave Cordoba an average score of 72.9 - just a few percentage points above the minimum-qualification cutoff of 70.

The highest-rated team, led by a company called Parsons Brinckerhoff, received a score of 93.7. A second company, David Evans and Associates, came in second with a score of 77.

Parsons Brinckerhoff oversaw an earlier phase of planning for the city's transit vision. In fact, it came up with the idea of using a streetcar in the first place, city Public Works Director James Ross said.

But Pulido said Parsons put forward a more limited transit vision than what he wanted, and responded too slowly to council requests. He said Cordoba stepped up to help and was instrumental in putting together the final streetcar plan.

"Relationships matter in the sense that you get to know people in good times and bad," said Pulido, who chairs the transportation committee which recommended that Cordoba take over the streetcar project. "But what really matters here is the responsiveness."

Pulido has said repeatedly that the city wants a "hybrid team" to work on the streetcar project, borrowing from the best of the three companies. But the proposal going before the City Council on Monday would give Cordoba and its partners 80 percent of the contract.

David Evans and its partners would get the remaining 20 percent of the work, according to a staff report. Parsons would not participate at all.

The City Council meeting begins at 6 p.m. Monday in City Hall, 22 Civic Center Plaza.

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